Missed it? You can still access our webinar that shared new and essential tactics for keeping app users engaged (and profitable)  — from onboarding to opt-ins. Get the info you need from our expert panel.

Access the webinar on demand right here.

A brand new year means a brand new opportunity to revise your mobile app strategy — which may need some close examination given how quickly things are evolving.

According to Leanplum CEO and cofounder Momchil Kyurkchiev, the number of smartphone users is expected to reach 6.1 billion in 2020. With mobile set to expand its user base by a significant margin in a mere four years, it’s never been more crucial to nail down a successful mobile strategy. However, too many businesses are stuck in the old ways of using bare-bones demographics to target their mobile customers, instead of using in-app behaviors to understand who their audience truly are.

During our webinar, “2016: The state of mobile,” Kyurkchiev and fellow respected industry figures — Lumosity GM (International) Fabian Seelbach and Slice product manager Tim Annan — discussed key learnings and analyzed past strategies regarding mobile. Here are a few key takeaways from the presentation.

Showing value of push notifications to users

“One of the really key things to understand is that the majority of users nowadays do not have push notifications enabled,” Kyurkchiev said. “In fact, only 43 percent of users enable push across the industry. If you really want to have a successful push notification strategy and apply that level to personalization, you want to ensure push notifications are actually something that users can receive on their end.”

Kyurkchiev cited Last Minute Travel as a company that increased its opt-in rate from a below-average 22 percent to an industry-leading 62 percent. Last Minute Travel removed the push notification enablement prompt that appeared when a user opened their app. They replaced it instead with multiple touch points along the customer journey, explaining in context why push notifications should be enabled.

By relaying the benefits of push notifications to the consumer at the appropriate time, such as asking the user for permission to send updates on potential flight delays after they booked their trip, Last Minute Travel experienced a push opt-in increase of 182 percent.

Re-engaging your mobile app audience

While discounts are often seen as a surefire way for app publishers to re-engage their audience, there are other ways to put the spark back in user engagements. For Lumosity — a brain-game and brain-training app — discounts are saved for users who are already in love with the app and want the additional value found in its premium subscription. To bring less frequent users back to the app, Lumosity offers reminders as a way to re-engage.

“We actually ask them if they would like to receive training reminders from us,” Seelbach said. “That is one of the tools that we have where the user can actually customize which data they want to receive — over email or push notification — and we then, at the right time of day, remind that user to come back into the app and complete their daily training session.”

“It’s been incredibly successful for us, because it’s one of those opt-in tools, where the user has said ‘Yes, I want to receive it.’ We have incredible rates of users coming back into the app and doing their training session for that day, because they found what time of day works well for them to do it day after day after day.”

Cost-effective user acquisition

“The best way to be cost-effective overall in user acquisition is making sure we maintain a large objective portfolio of acquisition channels,” Annan said about Slice, an app that allows users to track everything they buy online.

“We have some with really high cost per user; some with relatively low cost per user. Blending those allow us to make sure that we’re meeting an overall goal in terms of user acquisition and user acquisition cost — but also making sure we’re getting a good mix of users at a good enough volume to keep all the cogs turning at the same time,” said Annan.

To learn more about the state of mobile in 2016 and how to improve your strategy for future success, check out the full webinar video, now available on demand.

Don’t miss out!

Access the webinar on demand right here.

In this webinar, you’ll:

  • Optimize your user onboarding to improve lifelong retention
  • Learn about tools you didn’t know existed for driving deeper personalization
  • Triple mobile push notification opt-ins through new tactics that are proven success factors

Speakers:

Fabian Seelbach, GM International, Lumosity

Tim Annan, Product Manager, Slice

Momchil Kyurkchiev, Cofounder & CEO, Leanplum

Moderator:

Wendy Schuchart, Analyst, VentureBeat

This webinar is sponsored by Leanplum.